Managers seek to enhance employee performance by capitalizing on the potential for motivated behavior intended to improve performance. Methods often used to translate motivation into performance involve job design, participation and empowerment, alternative work arrangements, performance management, goal setting, and rewards.

Job design is how organizations define and structure jobs. Historically, there was a general trend toward increasingly specialized jobs, but more recently the movement has consistently been away from extreme specialization. Two early alternatives to specialization were job rotation and job enlargement. Job enrichment approaches stimulated considerable interest in job design.

The job characteristics theory grew from early work on job enrichment. One basic premise of this theory is that jobs can be described in terms of a specific set of motivational characteristics. Another is that managers should work to enhance the presence of those motivational characteristics in jobs, but should also take individual differences into account. Today the emerging opinion is that employees' job perceptions and attitudes are jointly determined by objective task properties and social information.

Participative management and empowerment can help improve employee motivation in many business settings. New management practices, such as the use of various kinds of work teams and of flatter, more decentralized methods of organizing, are each intended to empower employees throughout the organization. Organizations that want to empower their employees need to understand a variety of issues as they go about promoting participation.

Alternative work arrangements are commonly used today to enhance motivated job performance. Among the more popular alternative arrangements are compressed work weeks, flexible work schedules, job sharing, and telecommuting.